The 2025 Subaru Legacy Will Be the Last of Its Kind
For 35 years, the Legacy was a bread-and-butter sedan with AWD (once novel). But it’s a victim of the wild success of its offspring, the Outback.
Alex KiersteinWriterApr 23, 2024
2024 Subaru Legacy Sport 5
It’s been a good run. After 35 years, the midsize sedan that did more to mainstream all-wheel drive than arguably any other vehicle—and laid the groundwork for the extremely successful Outback wagon line—will end production. The final Subaru Legacy will roll off of the Subaru of Indiana Automotive factory sometime in 2025, which will also be its final model year.
90 Legacy
Credit the midsize Subaru Legacy sedan for mainstreaming all-wheel drive in an affordable consumer package, and also dispelling some AWD misconceptions over the years. Once derided as heavy, complex, and prone to tire wear, Subaru’s simple and robust viscous center differential system (in manual transmission models) and computer-controlled AWD system (automatics) eroded those biases, and eventually AWD became standard on all Subaru models (excepting sports cars like the BRZ). The Legacy evolved into a surprisingly fuel efficient, spacious, and well-regarded conveyance. Subaru’s near-universal reliance on boxer four-cylinders also lended the Legacy another point of differentiation, and the benefit of a lower center of gravity.
Legacy cutaway
The Legacy has rarely been exciting—and the 2024 model isn’t, although its overall safety, confidence-inspiring traction, and great ride make it a fantastic choice and our fifth-rated midsize sedan—but it’s always been agreeable. And when it has been exciting, it’s been a treat for Subaru enthusiasts keen to have something a little different from the boy-racer Impreza and its WRX descendants. From almost the beginning, the Legacy was available in the U.S. in a sporty turbocharged model, which loosely referenced the excitement of seeing Colin McRae’s Group A Legacy RS growling and popping around WRC stages to our shores. Over the years, various flat-six and turbo models were available on and off, including the fourth-generation Spec B.
96 Outback water
Subaru says that, over its six generations, all 1.3 million U.S. Legacys have been built at the Indiana facility, making it also a uniquely American success story of local production and local investment in the community. Subaru says the Legacy is being discontinued as consumer preferences shift to SUVs (like the Outback, which is still essentially a lifted, be-clad, and slightly altered Legacy wagon variant) and to EVs—of which Subaru wants to produce 8 models by 2028. Indiana is Subaru’s only U.S. facility and has always had volume constraints, and Subaru is constantly shuffling production for U.S. market models between Indiana and Japan depending on needs. Most recently, the Impreza ceased production in Indiana in May 2023, and moved back to Japan. Indiana currently produces the Crosstrek, Ascent, Outback, and (for now) Legacy.
One of the reasons we’ll miss the Legacy is its budget-friendly price. In 2024, at $26,016, it’s the cheapest AWD sedan available, following the demise of the smaller (and even more affordable) Impreza sedan. Even base models offer AWD traction and lots of room to stretch out in, and it’s an IIHS Top Safety Pick, too. The base 2.5-liter flat-four returns 35 mpg on the freeway, too, which isn’t shabby at all considering it’s not electrified in any way.
2024 Subaru Legacy Sport 5
It’s tough to imagine the Outback completely replacing the Legacy’s unique position in the market, the Outback being positioned as an would-be SUV and starting $4,000 or so higher than the Legacy. The smaller Impreza is, after all, only offered as a hatchback. Even though the sedan body style is no longer the sales juggernaut it once was, Subaru will have a hole in its lineup and it’s not clear how it will be filled. That said, Subaru sold merely 25,510 Legacy sedans in 2023, compared to a whopping 161,814 Outbacks and 159,193 Crosstreks. Those are non-zero sales figures, but it’s likely that many Legacy intenders will simply migrate up or down the model line to the next most attractive (and likely more profitable for Subaru) vehicle in the lineup.
Alex Kierstein
Like a lot of the other staffers here, Alex Kierstein took the hard way to get to car writing. Although he always loved cars, he wasn’t sure a career in automotive media could possibly pan out. So, after an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Washington, he headed to law school. To be clear, it sucked. After a lot of false starts, and with little else to lose, he got a job at Turn 10 Studios supporting the Forza 4 and Forza Horizon 1 launches. The friendships made there led to a job at a major automotive publication in Michigan, and after a few years to MotorTrend. He lives in the Seattle area with a small but scruffy fleet of great vehicles, including a V-8 4Runner and a C5 Corvette, and he also dabbles in scruffy vintage watches and film cameras.